I am not going to sugar coat it, I hate you. I hate you for making me fall in love with you when you **** well knew we weren't going to work out. Why wouldn't we work out? Oh, because you're a ******* liar. I have no idea who you are. Your whole being is non-existent to me. You're not real. The sad part is, you didn't even fight to make me stay. There's no way in hell I would stay either way, but it would have been nice to know you actually did love me. Obviously every "I love you" was a lie too. I meant nothing to you. I hate you for making me feel important when we both know I am nothing. I will always be nothing. I'm just everyones toy that gets tossed in the corner whenever they're tired of playing with me. That is all I will ever be. I just wish you saw me differently.


                                B.S.

Write everyday.
Write everyday no matter what.
Write even at a loss for words.
Write down the sounds.

I make notes of the plane crashes
I've never heard, the brook trout
that never shook pond water
onto the brittle grass when I didn't
catch it, or the thunder cup coil
I keep kneeing trying to give the overcast
over the mountain something to compete
with.

And I'm not sorry.
       I'm not.      I'm not sorry that my
reborn Christian best    friend    has   seen the    light,
and I still scoff when people pray over potatoes.
And I only believe in plastic Polaroid postcards
from last decade timestamped in the white space
with Bic black ink.
I'm not sorry for that.

And truth is, I've never washed this black shirt;
just hung it hoping that moths' would ****
the sweat spots and leave
the fabric.

I clenched the gold cap beneath
my ring finger from the glass green
bottle occupying my lips driving
down the Marsh Creek bridge.
I wanted to relate / to be relatable /
relative to the sedans, and seatbelts
too tight to breathe, passing me.

At the end of the bridge, where there was no chance
of drowning and the road color changed, I parked
in the driveway of a wooden house. Its blinds
were up, shades pulled apart with two hands
like gas station freezer doors, leaving them
vulnerable to the hiss of semi truck tractor
trailer high beams slicing through fifty +
raindrops per second going a few miles shy
of sixty-five, yet the people inside moved so freely.
I  sat Indian-style—a term I learned at four
then learned it to be racist at fourteen—
in their driveway, and ate the gravel
they walked on trying to taste security
because all I'd had in the last few hours
were plates of refried fear.

Fear of audit, of my teeth breaking off,
and of ending up like Eric Garner
when I heard that wailing
Voice of Justice
coming for me in the distance.

8:30 A.M.

She wakes him up with breakfast
on the night stand.
Two eggs over-easy and lightly burnt
on the bottom so the yolks don't run,
two pieces of sourdough toast cut
diagonally, and a cup of coffee /
no sugar, no cream / brewed
at 8:15, two hours after
she got up to clean the house.
She mopped the floors twice,
tied the trash bags and set
them at the curb. She tested, dusted,
and retested the stagnant ceiling fans.
She vacuumed the rugs and wiped
down all wood, granite, and steel
surfaces.

She lemon Pledges allegiance to him.

While he's at work, she cleans his laundry.
She clean-presses his button-ups, making
sure to cut any stray threads and neatly
mend any loose seams. She irons a firm
crease in his pants and shines his all-black
wingtips.     She doesn't use Kiwi. Something high-class
                      that I've never heard of.
When he comes home and sets his briefcase
near the furnace vent to sulk in his leather
chair, she consoles him. She pulls the lace hem
of her sundress to her waist and ***** his ****
until he comes to his senses.
You look like a billion-dollar, gold-plated
monument feeding the world rosegold birdseed
from your immaculate palm binding my hair
like a Dutch Warmblood's tail, darling.
She dabs the corners of her mouth trying
not to smudge her lipstick, straightens
her dress, and hurries off to wash
his car.

This guy was on the bar steps,
but mentally by the tap, mentally
lip-locked with a long neck lover
mentally on a beach  in Vietnam.
"Red Beach Two," I swear he said.
It could've been "we beat you,"
aimed at the Vietnamerican
bartender straining Manhattan
Projects for faceless suits toasting
by the jukebox beating out Springsteen.
Something about a bomb, millions of lives,
and innocent Satan. But that war's over now.
This guy must have seen some ****
because he kept his arms down
and eyes at attention like a death
march. He watched everything
like a liquid sky slowly draining,
leaving the Sun tacked up
to the cosmos. He pushed the crescent
moon over to get a better look
at Andromeda's guts, and tore
a hole in the pool lining. He revealed
more ocean with U-boats and Albatrosses
and the Enola Gay sobbing for what it had done.
And bombs / bombs / bombs. And Nagasaki,
we did it. It's our fault. "We're sorry"
spokesung to the beat of a two-finger
tremolo on a stretched hide drum.
And Hiroshima, we're sorry. We didn't know,
but we did. WE ******* KNEW ALL ALONG.
We made the bomb, we tested it in the desert,
we put a bow on it, and left it on your doorstep.
We left it beneath the arch. THE ARCH.
That arch I've seen in my dreams.
This guy,
broke and begging for a beer,
has seen it.
He is it.
He was the atom bomb and the bomber
and Hiroshima and the universe.
He is it.

Man, if there was ever a time
where those two hands mattered
more than just pointing
out the obvious or tracing vague
memories on paper in swoops,
zig-zags, draw-backs, or the capital
cursive "Q" that still eludes me, it's
now. 6:26 A.M., and I haven't slowed
down since 9:20 yesterday
when my girlfriend gallivanted
about her room, her ******* perked
before me.
*******, she looked so good.
We, my friends and I,—the ones
I wrapped in cellophane and tissue
paper two years ago to take
out, reminisce, and put back
whenever I forgot their faces—
got in my boat of a car / bathroom
tile white / and drove through
thick I-80 fog to search South
Side for Santa's front rotor biplane
dropping Christmas joy mustard
gas down molded-brick, soot-caked
chimneys to get people in the mood
for a day or two before the egg nog's
spiced *** negligee stopped feeding
their stocking stuffer lungs and the blisters
that decked the halls like boughs of death.
Then we sat—I, uncomfortably on my car
keys,—by the bar, drinking refills that filled
the IBM-print bill $60 worth of Sprite Pepsi
Huckleberry Lemonade. My one friend
leaned over our cornucopia of unfinished
wings and said that he and the bartender
had been exchanging loaded gun glances.

Neither would ease the trigger,
or even aim well.

She could've been eyeing the waitresses
working the floor like a dart game.
Sharp when your drink's low and feathered
by pathetic tips. We stopped by Lyco. Lynn—
softly steeled—still sung her circular saw blues.
Baby, don't cut me so deep. Just let my girders
meet the street. Let me feel small trees and admire
nice cars signing their makes in last week's thin snow.
We took away two cups of coffee, some Modernist talk,
and a salt & pepper flannel past Market, Maynard,
and slowly spoiling milk to the Mansfield exit.
Over the occasional window defrosting,
we talked premature families, North Carolina
classmates, prison sentences, and that MU
***** who hates my guts. They're out there,
and we're here in this box going seventy-five
and skipping exits like rope.
Double-dutch dual-enrollment college credit
transfers, losing Foundation money talks
****, but can't leave her grudges on the rock
salt steps we sulked up. Hallways with
carpets and our cars parked poolside,
but we chose air conditioning over breast-
strokes. My God, would some lonely preteens
**** for that. Metal detectors to detect
our insecurities and greasy faces full
of acne acne potential. Potential some
didn't use. Potential that went wasted.
Potential that could've gotten them out
of this miserable hole, but instead rented
them out a sad shack on the outskirts—
nowhere near suburbs—of town
where they could inhale
the Ox Yoke's smoke stack laying fog
down to the county line.
Galeton High School, regrettably,
here's to you.

Cool Daddy-os dig free
between a highway from then
breathing out youth,

breathing in universe,
holding their poetry guts,
letting them swell.

Swell big balloon pin *****
pop splatter ink notebook.
Words, words, planned lines.*

The cursive coffee house
where people yak metaphors
is congress. Mad.

And I'm a saucer cat
deciding to run, or burn,
when the cup tips.

And I'm the last few lights
radiating false security
on highway cars.

And I'm the road, hoarding
rubber tires and soda cans
for newish guard rails.

And I am oak trees mourning
fallen brothers, lovers 'cause
we all fall the same.

It all goes the same way.  
It all swells, pops, talks, burns, and
falls the same way.

My mom tried to sweep
clean the cigarette burns on the armrest,
and turned the plastic-cracked
lampshade away from rare houseguests.
The arrow-shaped gap melted
at the middle and leaked down
the shade like a stopped-
up gutter. Climbing out her bedroom
window, she knelt on the rotten
mint shingles and tossed matted
maple leaves as indiscriminately
as rock salt onto the glassy sidewalk
drinking in the overhead halo
of Penelec Electric and pine needles.

Needles—

The red biohazard suitcase
in the dining room is packed
full for distribution
in a Philadelphian switchyard.

City of Brotherly Burning Barrels
and railroad-tie benches—
but not for dressing up suburban
meditation gardens, or housing
yellow jackets and half-melted
Army men. For sitting, sleeping,
and supplying calf splinters
for small talk along the Schuylkill
River, watching the cell lights
of Eastern State get swallowed
whole by the systematic tall grass,
one by one, thanking some blessed
something for their freedom
in the boxcars, their *** and Lucifer
matches, and each other.